In 2011, we had our first ever conference. Our sponsors, speakers, and attendees were phenomenal. You rocked so much that we want to do it again! Mark your calendars for March 2013. This friendly, little PHP conference is returning to Nashville, TN.

To get the latest on this great conference, you can follow their account on Twitter and get news as it comes out. If you want to see what the previous conference was like, you can check out the site from 2011.

On the PEAR blog there's a recent post looking at the month of March so far and some of the PEAR-related happenings that have already popped up.

After a quiet holiday season, the PEAR community has started rumbling again. [...] If this level of activity is anything to judge by, the future of PEAR looks bright for 2010!

Updates this month include a mention of the PEAR project on digg.com, the release of several new package versions for things like Facebook and the Mail package. They've also set up a continuous integration environment to help make the maintenance and testing of the code in the new releases simpler. There's also mentions of Phirum and PEARFarm and how they're lowering the barrier for PEAR installation everywhere.

Daniel Cousineau has written up some timely advice in a new post to his blog. It looks at pinpointing the time boundary for Daylight Savings Time in a PHP script (when it starts and when it ends).

I had an issue recently where I needed to calculate the Unix timestamp for the daylight savings time boundaries. According to the United States Naval Observatory, daylight savings time begins the Second Sunday of March and ends on the First Sunday of November.

He looks at using the strtotime function to calculate these dates but points out some quirks - like what happens when you just give it a month or something like "second Sunday". His solution was to go back one day ("March 0" instead of "March 1") and calculating the time from there, including that first full day of March in the calculation.

...and much more! You can get this latest episode in two different ways - either download the mp3 directly or you can subscribe to their feed and get this and other great episodes packed with news from all around the PHP community.

Back on track, mostly. We had to use the crappy internal mic on my laptop, but it's better than shouting to the next town over... right?

There's lots of different topics covered this time including the infamous CLA, Traits, Late Static Bindings, PHP on Windows, Drupal 6 and much more. You can either grab the show directly from the page or you can subscribe to their feed to get this and future episodes.

Chris Shiflett has posted about the release of the latest issue from php|architect - March 2006 - and some of the security-related content inside.

Another edition of php|architect has been published. I was especially excited to read this one, because it's Ilia's first month writing Security Corner. It's nice to see a topic explained from a different point of view, and there is still too little interest in security within the PHP community. (In other words, this is a rare opportunity.)

He discusses cross-site request forgeries, an attack first mentioned in php|architect back in 2003. Sadly, it remains one of the most dangerous, yet relatively unknown attacks. It deserves more attention.

Chrisgoes into more detail about the issue, noting some of the differences of opinion that he and Ilia seem to have about the finer points. There's also a pertinent secret shared about Chris' comment forms - check the post to see what it is.

Helmut Tessarek's look at the DB2/Zend Core for IBM - what it is and how to use it

A look at "Building Scalable PHP Applications" by Chris Hartjes

A piece trying to make sense of why frameworks have become such a big deal (by Darryl Patterson)

the two columns from the usual suspects - Jeff Moore's "Test Pattern" and Ilia Alshanetsky in the "Security Corner"

If you're not already a subscriber (or haven't checked out an issue yet), take a look at their free issue. If you already know the quality php|architect has to offer or just want to pick up this latest issue, head over to their online store and purchase it today!